Monitoring the atmospheric gasses in and around an oil refinery may be performed to determine whether hydrogen sulfide is present, and to qualify its concentration if it is detected. Monitoring a gas cloud heading toward an Army base may be useful to determine whether that cloud contains chemical warfare agents. Existing techniques, including TDLS (Tunable Diode Laser Spectroscopy), NDIR (Non-Dispersive InfraRed analysis), Polychromatry, and FTIR (Fourier Transform InfraRed analysis) all have limitations that, depending on the application, can limit their ability to detect atmospheric gasses at the desired level.
Identifying unknown chemical contaminant in the atmosphere from afar can be very difficult because normal components of the atmosphere such as H2O and CO2 (water vapor and carbon dioxide) have spectral signatures that are similar to, and overlap with the spectral signature of many of the contaminants of interest.
Existing Dynamic Eigen Spectroscopy can be designed to have superb chemical specificity, i.e., they can be designed to be very sensitive to the emission or absorption of one specific chemical or group of chemicals while being very insensitive to other chemicals or groups of chemical. Unfortunately, when such systems are manufactured they might not perform as well as modeled.